Pass go, collect two hundred pounds...

[sawyl]

A day of much virtupitude and efficiency — but obviously not quite enough, since I'm retro-conning this — despite a unusually late finish for a Friday. Here a few of the highlights:

• I managed to ace my six-monthly appraisal by bombarding my confessor with vast quantities of evidence for the work that I've done over the last six months. In the end, I think, both of us were surprised by quite how much I'd done and by what a range it spanned. In the end, my confessor pronounced himself impressed with my focus and drive — not two adjectives I'd apply to myself from my internal perspective where I seem to see nothing by my shortcomings — and praised my guru-like, academic aura of knowledge — yet more proof, if it were needed, that I don't really fit the typical civil servant template.
• I finally fixed a nagging problem in a user exit I'd set up to prevent certain high priority jobs from swapping. It transpired that I'd made the mistake of trying to compare the current hostname against the job hostname using an equality test, instead of using a pattern match, resulting in false negatives in cases where the job hostnames contained a reference to a specific network interface rather than the plain hostname of the system.
• A good meeting/presentation based on a revised version of my security paper, this time concentrating on some of the points that I'd emphasised after they failed to come across clearly in the first presentation. The points were well received — when I presented my updates to my colleagues for criticism yesterday, the only negative comment I got back was that I'd mis-spelt the word "interactive" in the last paragraph — and we had a good, focused discussion of the ideas, both low level technical and high level architectural, afterwards. It was almost fun!
• Despite being late leaving work — the meeting didn't finish until half three! — I still managed to put in a decent performance in the pool. Perhaps not quite as good as yesterday but still far, far better than Wednesday.

And those are only the my highlights. In between, I continued work on a couple of my on-going but lower level projects, prepped for next week's course and caught up on my usual end of week bureaucracy. All of which goes some small way to making me feel that I, just this once, I might have come out ahead against the inevitable forces of entropy...